From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

Part 1 here: broad overview and tracing through the changing connotation of the “Computational Metaphor” from one of dehumanization and control to one of anonymity, equality, and freedom.

Part 2 here: On Stewart Brand’s education and the Whole Earth Network.

This is the part with digital communities.

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I’m turning up the speed on these notes. The whole book is interesting, can’t rewrite everything. For example, a lot about Xerox PARC and SRI is cut out because I feel it is more commonly known stuff.

 

I.

The New Communalist movement was dead by the 80’s. Its component communes were emptying out for a variety of reasons: politics, economics, and (predominantly) poor organization. Some took refuge in the New Age movement or in the small religious revivals of the 70’s. Many returned to the mainstream in time to enjoy some incredible economic failings.

So the counterculture died, but as I’ve written several times over the months, it did leave behind values and artifacts ripe for re-appropriating by other cultures. Through connecting the social groups and giving voice to some of their unifying concerns, Stewart Brand seeded the hacker movement with the New Communalist rhetoric.

“As early as 1972, Brand had suggested that computers might become the new LSD, a new small technology that could be used to open minds and reform society.” [Cue 1984 Apple commercial. You know the one.]

In a piece he was commissioned to write for Rolling Stone [“Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums”], he made the Spacewar computer game programmers into countercultural pioneers. Brand wrote about Alan Kay and his Dynabook, ARPANET, and Resource One. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.”

Turner: “Hackers, [Brand wrote], were not mere ‘technicians’ but ‘a mobile newfound elite, with its own apparatus, language and character, its own legends and humor. Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.'”

 

II.

Alan Kay and others found the Whole Earth Catalog, and saw it as both an information tool (with a great DIY ethos, etc.) and a hyperlinked information system. “We thought of the Whole Earth Catalog as a print version of what the Internet was going to be.”

“The Catalog performed similar ideological work within two other groups that would play an important role in the imagining the use of computers in countercultural terms: the People’s Computer Company and Resource One.” PCC was heavily inspired by the Catalog and made that very clear in its content- sometimes excerpts from the Catalog, sometimes advertising/selling books by Catalog-connected writers. Resource One was composed of programmers who left UC Berkeley in protest of the Cambodian invasion. It was partially funded by Fred Moore’s “Demise Party money”, and it aimed to “establish public computing terminals at several locations in the Bay area, with an eye toward creating a peer-to-peer information exchange.” Although the abstract idea was thought of in New Left/New Communalist movements before, the idea of doing something like this without a computer (outside of SRI and Xerox PARC)

Time magazine, special issue- Stewart Brand writes an article titled “Welcome to Cyberspace”: “Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair. The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.”

[Turner:] “According to Brand, and to popular legend then and since, Bay area computer programmers had imbibed the countercultural ideals of decentralization and personalization, along with a keen sense of information’s transformative potential, and had built those into a new kind of machine.” It is true-ish rendition of what happens, more selective than false, and certainly claimable in some respects.

 

III.

Twenty years after the Whole Earth Catalog’s first publication, another network arose using the same model: the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985.

[Larry Brilliant quick bio: technologist and epidemiologist, some counterculture ties including appearing as a doctor in a hit hippie movie in the era, leading figure in the WHO’s smallpox eradication program. Much later would head Google.org (the philanthropic arm of Google), and the Skoll Foundation. Impressive arc in its own right.]

It was the first virtual community of its kind, an influential template for future such communities. It was also in itself an influential network of thinkers, writers, and Grateful Dead fans. It was originally a “dial-up bulletin board system”, and evolved with the infrastructure of the commercial internet as it developed.

Kevin Kelly [editor of Catalog-spinoff “CoEvolution Quarterly” and future exec editor of Wired] on the seven design goals:

That it be free. This was a goal, not a commitment. We knew it wouldn’t be exactly free but it should be as free (cheap) as we could make it…

It should be profit making… after much hard, low-paid work by Matthew and Cliff, this is happening. The WELL is at least one of the few operating large systems going that has a future.

It would be an open-ended universe…

It would be self-governing…

It would be a self-designing experiment… the early users were to design the system for later users. The usage of the system would co-evolve with the system as it was built…

It would be a community, one that reflected the nature of the “Whole Earth” publications. I think that worked out fine.

Business users would be its meat and potatoes. Wrong…

Turner: “Ultimately, [Grateful Dead’s John Perry] Barlow argued that cyberspace offered what LSD, Christian mysticism, cybernetics, and countercultural “energy” theory had all promised: transpersonal communion. ‘In this silent world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone. […] As a result of [the opening of cyberspace], humanity is now undergoing the most profound transformation of its history. Coming into the Virtual World, we inhabit Information. Indeed, we become Information. Thought is embodied and Flesh is made Word. It’s weird as hell.’ […] Framed as the disembodied, non-hierarchical, high-tech home of computer hackers and other independent types, cyberspace, and its prototypical system, the WELL, constituted fitting alternatives to corporate and governmental hives. In the cybernetic style familiar to readers of the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, Barlow held out cyberspace as a simultaneously technological, biological, and social system.”

 

IV.

Ronald Reagan: “In the new economy, human invention increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. We’re breaking through the material conditions of existence to a world where man creates his own destiny.”

In the late eighties and early nineties, Silicon Valley’s innovations scaled out across the world at increasing pace. The WELL and her related groups were used as intellectual and social capital for Brand and Kelly:

Each created new network forums in which formerly distinct communities could come together, exchange legitimacy, and become visible, to one another and to outsiders, as a single entity. In Brand’s case, these communities included representatives of MIT’s Media Lab and the Stanford Research Institute and officers of such corporate giants as Royal Dutch/Shell, Volvo, and AT&T, as well as former New Communalists. In the late 1980s Brand helped turn these individuals into the principals and clients of a small but highly influential consulting firm, the Global Business Network. For his part, Kevin Kelly linked computer simulation experts affiliated with Los Alamos National Laboratory and its offshoot, the Santa Fe Institute, to prairie ecologists, Biospherians, and programmers at Xerox PARC. In a 521-page volume entitled “Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization”, Kelly transformed these scientists and their projects into prototypical representatives of what he claimed was a new era in human evolution.

Turner compares these networks to the Cold War Military-Industrial Complex [on the inside, with their trading zones and interdisciplinarity, not the view from the outside as a Monolith]. These new networks “acquired a new political valence”, as “models of a collaborative world, a world in which technologies were rending information systems visible, material production processes irrelevant, and bureaucracy obsolete.”

Restless (and capable of leaving the surviving networks to their own machination), Stewart Brand left the area for a while. He attended one of the first of Richard Saul Wurman’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences and “heard Nicholas Negroponte describe his plans for MIT’s new Media Lab.” It reminded him of an old vision he had to turn the Whole Earth Catalog crew into a research group. He wrote to Negroponte, got a three-month appointment, and moved into Alan Kay’s house. “Surrounded by computer scientists, musicians, and artists, all linked together by e-mail, Brand began to imagine the Lab as an emblem of a techno-tribal future. In that future, as in the New Communalist past, independent interdisciplinarians would take up tools, transform their individual mind-sets, and establish new collectivities built on a shared delight in innovation.” He would write his best-selling profile of the Lab, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, which threaded the Media Lab through two histories: one from the Rad Lab of World War II, and one from the countercultural revolution, through the computer labs of the 1980’s. Like other networks, the Media Lab made demos and was also itself a demo, a prototype for a kind of culture.

 

V.

The Global Business Network was founded by Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Stewart Brand, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson. In its early years, corporate clients would pay annually to access their network through a private website, access materials, and attend training and learning seminars.

Peter Schwartz knew Stewart from their counterculture days (he wrote some for the Whole Earth Review). Schwartz would become a director at the Strategic Environment Center at SRI International. He would then become the head of scenario planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, where they impressively protected Shell against oil shocks using a method of “scenario planning” developed by futurist Herman Kahn.

Schwartz hired Brand to “organize a series of networking events known as the Learning Conferences; those events in turn gave rise to a network organization that, like the Media Lab, would have a substantial impact on public perceptions of digital technology and the New Economy.”

“At the height of the cold war, countercultural artists and communards had hoped to create alternative to bureaucratic technocracy. Now, in the late 1980’s, as the cold war wound to a close, Brand, [Arie] de Geus, and Schwartz melded countercultural and cybernetic rhetoric, practice, and social theory to help corporate executives model and manage their work lives in a post-Fordist economy. The learning networks would model the networks that Brand had worked on before: artifacts that were also networks, environments that can teach and be taught, and social networks that would interconnect. Participants were invited to private conferences and, later, to the WELL.

Jay Ogivly was hired by Schwartz at the SRI and became the director of research for the SRI Values and Lifestyles Program (marketing research), and the two “wanted to design a consulting firm that could take advantage of the networks and networking mind-set that had begun to emerge around the Learning Conferences.” In 1987 these two brought together the other Global Business Network cofounders: Stewart Brand, Napier Collyns (from Shell), and Lawrence Wilkinson (“a Bay area financier and media producer who was president of Colossal Pictures [film and TV]”).

Schwartz envisioned three things GBN would do: “plug [clients into a network of remarkable people… include them in a highly focused and filtered information flow, and… reorganize their perceptions about alternative futures through the scenario method.”

 

VI.

“For founders of GBN, computers were only one of several forces driving the leveling of bureaucracies and the rise of networked patterns of organization. […] for Kevin Kelly, in contrast, computers became signal emblems of a new era in human development”: neobiological civilization.

Kevin Kelly became editor of CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) [again, a spinoff of Whole Earth Catalog that Brand had launched] in 1984. He was deeply involved in the turn away from the back-to-the-land movements and toward digital technologies. He published writers who appeared on WELL, got interested in early virtual reality, compiled Cyberpunk reading lists, interviewed prominent digital entrepreneurs and researchers and writers like William Gibson, and in 1990 he published “Crime and Puzzlement”, where Barlow “first used the word cyberspace to describe the digital frontier”.

In 1987, the Santa Fe Institute, Apple Computer, and the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Lab sponsored the first Artificial Life Conference. To Kelly this conference validated the “long-standing Whole Earth embrace of systems theory.” His experiences were compiled in his book Out of Control. He brought together four communities in his reporting: the “descendants of the cold war research world [Los Alamos, Xerox PARC, MIT’s Media Lab], Whole Earth affiliates [the WELL, ecologists], designers and theorists in “new forms of computing” [Sim Earth, artificial life, multiple-user dungeons], and corporations [“Benetton, Pixar, Disney”]. He wrote of bee swarms as social systems held together by the exchange of information, basically without hierarchy. He wrote about crowdsourcing and collective computing.

Kelly:

The Atom is the icon of 20th century science… The Atom whirls alone, the epitome of singleness. It is the metaphor for individuality: atomic. It is the irreducible seat of strength. The Atom stands for power and knowledge and certainty. It is as dependable as a circle, as regular as round. […]

Another Zen thought: The Atom is the past. The symbol of science for the next century is the dynamical Net.

The Net icon has no center- it is a bunch of dots connect to other dots-  a cobweb of arrows pouring into each other, squirming together like a nest of snakes, the restless image fading at indeterminate edges. The Net is the archetype- always the same picture- displayed to represent all circuits, all intelligence, all interdependence, all things economic and social and ecological, all communications, all democracy, all groups, all large systems.

Markets were like this system, “distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive.” Firms were like organisms.

By the mid-nineties, Brand and Kelly’s wave of projects to that point were mostly self-sustaining- the Global Business Network, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the WELL, etc.

By 1995 Brand cofounded the Long Now Foundation and its project to build a Ten Thousand Year Clock. Kevin Kelly helmed Wired magazine, a symbol of the Digital Revolution.

 

VII.

Wired founder and editor-in-chief Louis Rossetto: “There are a lot of magazines about technology. Wired is not one of them. Wired is about the most powerful people on the planet today- the Digital Generation. These are the people who not only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications and the media is transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen.”

Wired Magazine became a touchstone. “Thanks in part to a confluence of extraordinary economic, technological, and political currents, its technocentric optimism became a central feature of the biggest stock market bubble in American history.” Other New Economy publications sprung up all around it.

Jane Metcalfe, cofounder and president (and Rossetto’s wife): “The ’60s generation had a lot of power, but they didn’t have a lot of tools. And in many respects their protests were unable to implement long-term and radical change in our society. We do have the tools. The growth of the Internet and the growing political voice of the people on the Internet is proof of that.”

The governing myth of the end of the century had developed, that America could be freed by the apparently rigid 20th century bureaucracies: “market populism”, embodied across the political spectrum and in the business world. Some of these beliefs anti-system beliefs were attributed to the New Left of the 60s, but Turner has argued that these beliefs were more directly influenced by the New Communalists.

Rossetto himself was at Columbia during the days of the SDS and the increasingly violent police/protest feedback. He was the president of the Young Republicans, though by his junior year “he had begun to think of himself as a libertarian anarchist.” He brought together a circle of the like-minded to read “Wilhelm Reich’s calls for sexual freedom”, McLuhan and Ayn Rand.

Rossetto and Stan Lehr in The New York Ties Magazine [“The New Right Credo- libertarianism”], 1977: “Liberalism, conservatism, and leftist radicalism are all bankrupt philosophies. The only question at issue among their adherents is which gang of crooks and charlatans is to rule society, and for what noble purpose.” [A much older Rosetto recalled: “It wasn’t the Buckleyite conservatism that got me- it was the individualist, anti-statist conservatism that got me.”] Like the New Communalists, he became anti-political. “You have to start with yourself.” He wrote, moved to Europe, met his wife, and created a magazine that would be called Electric Word, that Kevin Kelly would give a positive review. Rossetto would begin coming back to the US to try to bring the magazine there, meeting with journalists (including Kelly).

Electric Word would go out of business but Rossetto and Metcalfe would move to the USA, to start a new lifestyle-and-technology magazine, Millenium (later renamed Wired). He brought the prototype magazine to TED, and Nicholas Negroponte loved it, investing $75k for a 10% stake and promising to write a monthly column. He also brought other investors on board. Rossetto and Metcalfe would start a conference on the WELL, and Bruce Katz (then-head of the WELL) referred them to Schwartz, who brought in GBN cofounder Lawrence Wilkinson to become the chief financial strategist. Kevin Kelly finally signed on as executive editor. Thus Wired was thoroughly stitched into the whole fabric of the Whole Earth network.

Rossetto, 1997: “The mainstream media is not allowing us to understand what’s really happening today because it’s obsessed with telling you, ‘Well, on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand'”.

Turner: “Under conditions of digital revolution, Rossetto believed that a magazine could tell the truth- and achieve distinction- only by ‘not being objective’.”

Rossetto and Metcalfe described their target audience in 1992 as “Digital Visionaries”, average income $75k, the top 10% of “creators, managers, and professionals in the computer industries, business, design, entertainment, the media, and education.” After its third year, Wired was selling 300k/month, 87.9% male, avg 37 years old, $122k income, 90% “professional/managerial” or “Top Management”.

“Wired was not, by and large, opening a window on the world of the WELL per se. Rather, its editors were using their links to the WELL to a variety of other Whole Earth networks and organizations in order to conjure up and legitimate a particular social vision.”

The WELL network was beneath Wired. Wired itself could interface with people who would have found the New Communalists distasteful. The New Right could reference and be referenced by Wired. Newt Gingrich, Esther Dyson, and George Gilder [libertarian telecommunications analyst] could become involved in a “cycle of mutual legitimation”.

Wired nearly IPO’d for some truly insane figures, but Goldman Sachs would withdraw, and a few years later the big bubble busted.

Needless to say, the ideology has survived intact.

I’ll stop here.

 

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

Part I here: A broad overview, tracing through the changing connotation of the “Computational Metaphor” from one of dehumanization and control to one of anonymity, equality, and radical freedom.

I often get bogged down in the details because there’s so much interesting here. I’ll be trying to wean off of that habit. Didn’t really succeed here, but at least I occasionally took the opportunity to explain my interest some of the details I highlight.

[Edit: This post has some occasional typos. I rushed it out, and will smooth it over soon.]

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I.

It’s a shame that the environmentalist movement is mostly solidly anti-nuclear. Even considering the scariness of the “Normal Accident” problem, it should seem to the modern environmentalist that a re-calibration is needed on the issue [due to climate change]. Wind and solar are wonderful, but another resource (almost always of the ‘dirty’ variety) will always need to be on standby for “cloudy or windless days”. Storage and location are still major problems. Our idea of what a nuclear plant looks and feels like is decades old. The public idea of what radiation is and what it does and what levels are acceptable and its carcinogenic potential, are all still mysterious and mostly dated. Nuclear France is kicking solar Germany’s ass on carbon footprint metrics. Barring a jarring global event, knowledge of nuclear energy/weapons are never going away, and nuclear power if anything has reduced the number of nukes in the world through use of old warheads as material. Finally, and this should be obvious, a nuclear bomb is not a world-ending calamity- the more cogent fear is of a massive volley of ICBMs criss-crossing the air between global powers. The nuke [singular] decimating your hometown was a personal fear, a scary and heavily-proliferated image. But nukes [plural] were the real human-existential threat.

It made sense in the ’70’s, especially among the young Left movements, to be anti-nuclear anything. Having grown up in the shadow of The Bomb, developing a deep and growing distrust of the governing institutions and whatnot. Stewart Brand was predictably anti-nuclear growing up (he has since changed position, presumably for similar reasons to the scramble of points I made above, since they were all points in a recent documentary I read that he was behind).

Alongside this fear of the bomb was the fear of the aftermath: a Soviet invasion or an emulation of the Soviets [or the Fascist threat before them] in mechanizing and becoming a war-bound society- in both scenarios the individual would become a number, a pawn. If not annihilation of the bomb, fear of an annihilation of the self was another key driver in this cohort, the way this story has it.

Again, clear in the imagination of the time was the juxtaposition of the Soviet Army with the gray suited Organization Man, “cut off from his emotions, trained to follow a chain a command, the Soviet soldier and the American middle manager alike seemed to many to be little more than worker bees inside ever-growing hives of military-industrial bureaucracy.” The bureaucratic machine birthed the nuke in the 40’s and would birth Vietnam in the 60’s. The key question for Brand’s generation: “How could they keep the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons or by the large-scale, hierarchical governmental and industrial bureaucracies that had built and used them? And how could they assert and preserve their own holistic individuality in the face of such a world?”

 

II.

Brand’s answer to this question started with ecology and “a systems-oriented view of the natural world.” After graduating an serving as an army draftee, he drifted into the art world, a world whose shape was outlined in The Democratic Surround. According to Turner, the “art worlds of the 1960’s” began to structurally resemble “the research worlds of the 1940’s”, living “by networking, entrepreneurship, and collaboration.”

Brand’s exposure to ecological thought started with professor Paul Ehrlich, later famous for The Population Bomb. During this time, systems-thought had replaced the single-species taxonomic thought of pre-war science. Lily Kay wrote that in the ’50’s, microbiology became “a communication science, allied to cybernetics, information theory, and computers.” According to Turner, in the textbook Ehrlich co-wrote with Richard Holm, The Process of Evolution, he “offered a vision of life as ‘a complex energy-matter nexus […] For Ehrlich and Holm, the classic dualities of mind and matter, actor and action, masked a series of more essential truths: individuals were elements within systems and were systems in their own right. As such, they both responded to and helped shape the flows of energy that governed all matter. [More on this thought here.] This was also true for humans at a cultural level: according to Ehrlich and Holm, culture had grown out of man’s biological evolution and had become a force through which humans could recursively influence their biological development. For Ehrlich and Holm, and the young Stewart Brand, cultural activities such as politics, art, conversation, and play took on a deep significance for the survival of the species.”

Brand spent a decade or so “migrating” through a “wide variety of bohemian, scientific, and academic communities.” Some of these communities were wide-reaching, ideologically communalist. Other groups were focused on “local social practices”, like making art or taking LSD or running a business meeting.

Soon after graduating from Stanford, Brand was drafted, becoming an infantryman, then deciding to become a Ranger (!) and then quitting halfway through and becoming an army photographer. In the early 60’s he would meet a San Francisco painter (Steve Durkee), who lived in lower-Manhattan. Brand would visit there and see the scenes- the influential John Cage was there, the painter Rauschenberg, the performance artist Allan Kaprow.

Cage’s view of Zen: [Within Zen nature was “an interrelated field or continuum, no part of which can be separated from or valued above the rest.” Turner claims that “In keeping with Zen tradition, Cage argued that the artist should not speak to his or her audience about the natural world, but should instead use art to heighten the audience member’s sensitivity to experiences of all kinds.”

Cage: “The highest purpose [of an artist] is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation.” The objective consciousness has no place in art.

Rauschenberg: “I don’t want painting to be just an expression of my personality. And I am opposed to the whole idea of conception-execution- of getting an idea for a picture and then carrying it out. I’ve always felt as though, whatever I’ve used and whatever I’ve done, the method was always closer to a collaboration with materials than to any kind of conscious manipulation and control.”

Critic/Professor Leonard B. Meyer argued that these “American artists had begun to work with the premise that ‘Man is no longer… the center of the universe’ and that the universe itself, as revealed by quantum physic, was an indeterminate system.” For Brand, though, it was an affirmation of the Ehrlich school of thought.

 

III.

After discharge (1962), Brand would travel to “the artistic bohemians of New York City and the emerging hippie scene in Haight-Ashbury [USCO, where Brand surely took drugs, read Wiener and McLuhan and Fuller, experienced ‘Happenings’].”, Indian reservations, Ken Kesey’s circle, psych researchers, and a series of communes. Studies in new ways of living.

Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters” are sort of notorious in some circles- the influential psychedelics-promoting group of writers and artists who lived communally for a while, and took a long road-trip across America. Brand represented, as Tom Wolfe put it, “the restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters”, and didn’t go on that roadtrip. Brand saw the Pranksters as a West Coast version of “USCO’s techno-tribalism”, feeding off of the California Beatnik scene instead of the New York cold war avante-garde scene.

New Communalist Kesey is invited to New Left rally against the Vietnam war. Kesey gets up and says, “You know, you’re not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching… That’s what they do.” Then he plays Home on the Range with his harmonica. The New Communalist movement was about “politics of consciousness”, not about engaging in contemporary, social politics as the New Left was.

Also of note, although the Pranksters were less formally hierarchical and rigid than the New Left, they did have a single, de facto leader- Kesey, “The Chief”. He would deny or downplay his power, but it was his money and his voice that powered the Pranksters across America. They would play games to make decisions (spin-the-bottle with the winner having total control for 30 minutes; consulting the I Ching) both were voluntary, individual-empowering, and both served as diversions from Kesey’s true power.”In a pattern that would become familiar around the digital technologies of the 1990’s, [the Pranksters assigned their power], at least temporarily and at least symbolically, to devices.

Brand collaborated with Kesey and others on the “Trips Festival” and other big parties and multimedia events. He tried to create “holistic media environments of the kind favored by USCO and the Merry Pranksters.”

 

IV. An Aside on Communes

“…Yet, even though it aimed to draw commune dwellers closer to themselves and their fellow citizens, the antinomian celebration of consciousness and its pursuit through the deployment of small-scale technologies and hands-on work did not prevent either social friction or the reassertion of traditional gender roles and racial politics.”

There’s a problem with the idea of structurelessness, and that problem is that no such thing exists. Structureless, with regards to humans, means tribal. Wired magazine recently quoted Jo Freeman from “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (the above link) in this article on recent retreads of the same fundamental error:

The problem with supposedly non-hierarchical groups, she wrote, is that power structures are invisible–and therefore unaccountable. That inevitably leads to dysfunction and abuse. Charismatic leaders could use their position to advance their own agenda, award desirable tasks and projects to an “in group,” and shift blame for mistakes.

In my post about totalitarianism I also quoted an article that introduced this idea while introducing Turner’s New Left vs New Communalist dichotomy:

Bureaucratic systems are actually really good systems for distributing resources. You have to negotiate. You have to express explicitly what resources exist and how they should be distributed. In a communal system built around shared consciousness, what starts to happen is that people with charisma start to lead and cultural norms kick in. Communes ended up being places that were deeply racially divided, even though none of them would ever cop to being explicitly racist or wouldn’t even want to be. Gender norms were incredibly conservative on communes. I don’t know how many photographs I’ve looked at of young women, pregnant, barefoot, carrying loaves of bread.

And by the way, communes outside of the New Communalist tradition generally had different defaults on social structure (more equitable child-rearing in some communes, often with a different view of the nuclear family, and an opportunity for women to have relationships without reference to their partnerships with men?). But the “neoprimitive tribal ideal” in the New Communalist communes were generally more like settlers than tribesmen.

Other problems abounded in the New Communalist diaspora, socially and financially.

 

V.

Stewart Brand:

One afternoon, probably in March in 1966, dropping a little bit of LSD, I went up onto the roof and sat shivering in a blanket sort of looking and thinking… And so I’m watching the building, looking out at San Francisco, thinking of Buckminster Fuller’s notion that people think of the earth’s resources as unlimited because they think of the earth as flat. I’m looking at San Francisco from 300 feet and 200 micrograms up and thinking that I can see from here that the earth is curved. I had the idea that the higher you go the more you can see earth as round.

There were no public photographs of the whole earth at that time, despite the fact that we were in the space program for about ten years. I started scheming within the trip. How can I make this photograph happen? Because I have now persuaded myself that it will change everything if we can have this photograph looking at the earth from space.

“The next week, Brand printed up a batch of buttons that read, “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth yet?” He and his wife would eventually start the Whole Earth Catalog, “featuring a smorgasbord of books, mechanical devices, and outdoor recreational gear.” No narrative, just artifacts. Pick your own purpose. The Catalog didn’t accept orders, but it did accept recommendations and comments. It was not a book or a magazine or a mail-order outlet. It was a single textual space that connected distinct countercultures and identified Stewart Brand as an essential link, a cultural broker.

Turner: “The space in turn became a network forum- a place where members of these communities came together, exchanged ideas and legitimacy, and in the process synthesized new intellectual frameworks and new social networks. By coining the term network forum I aim to bridge two important ideas in science and technology studies: Peter Galison’s notion of the “trading zone” and Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer’s “boundary object”.

More Turner on this term:

A network forum displays the properties of both a trading zone and a boundary object. Like the boundary object, it can be a media formation such as a catalog or an online discussion system aronud or within which individuals can gather and collaborate without relinquishing their attachment to their home networks. But like a trading zone, it is also a place within which new networks can be built, not only for social purpose, but for the purpose of accomplishing work. Within the network forum, as within the trading zone, contributors create new rhetorical tools with which to express and facilitate their new collaborations. Network forums need not be confined to media. Think tanks, conferences, even open-air markets – all can serve as forums in which one or more entrepreneurs gather members of multiple networks, allow them to communicate and collaborate, and so facilitate the formation of both new networks and new contact languages. Media-based network forums such as the “Whole Earth Catalog”, however, are in part built out of these new languages and are in part sites for their display. Ultimately, the forum themselves often become prototypes of the shared understandings around which they are built.

More soon. Check out the Whole Earth Catalog here. A gold mine.

 

VI. The Demise Party

One last anecdote.

On June 21, 1971, Stewart Brand threw a party to celebrate “what he thought was the final edition of the Whole Earth Catalog publishing project. He invited 500 friends and staffers to the event, and essentially offered for them to vote on how to allocate $20,000 to any cause, and any guest could approach the mic to appeal to a cause. By the next morning, a tired crowd voted on a solution. By then, $5,000 or so dollars had simply disappeared, but the remaining 15k was given “to one Frederick L. Moore, who promised to put the money in a bank and reconvene the last twenty people at the party in a month to decide what to do with it.”

These things happen.

Turner: “What ultimately became of the money remains unclear, but Moore’s fate does not. In the spring of 1975, along with Gordon French, he founded the Homebrew Computer Club.”

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From the Whole Earth Catalog, demonstrating the focus on DIY, pragmatic, small-scale tech:

An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:

1. Useful as a tool,
2. Relevant to independent education,
3. High quality or low cost,
4. Not already common knowledge
5. Easily available by mail.

 

More later.